I use windows XP with toned-down graphics options (it looks quite a bit like Windows 9x actually) for gaming.
The NT core that is shared with XP and Vista is pretty great, I remember my uncle's computer getting BSOD regularly on 95/98 whereas I have never experienced that on my computer for the whole 4 years I've owned it. I have never had the (mis?)pleasure of using Windows 2000.

Whenever I used Windows, I loved Win2k. Unfortunately it is no longer supported and I would not trust it now (even less than I would trust any version of Windows now). I can't vouch for Vista since I've never used it. However, if all of the rumors I've heard are true, I'd stay away from it. So I can only recommend XP out of that list. XP isn't horrible but much more bloated than 2k. I can only imagine Vista being even more bloated. Coming from me, a devout KDE user, I think that says alot.

Actually, Vista isn't as bad as it's painted to be. Most of the criticism come from:
1) Windoze users who can't just grasp the idea that Vista doesn't let the system resources sit idle and instead preloads some of your installed apps so they start faster and releases resources as they're needed by apps not preloaded (something *NIX have been doing ever since it has existed, but windoze users never knew it since DOS (from where windoze came to be) had a very primitive resource handling system)
2) Mac and Linux users who haven't used the thing but want to just bash it b/c bashing M$ and it's software is the cool thing to do among themselves.
3) And more importantly M$ themselves. You see, somewhere during the development stages of Vista, the M$ exec's decided that desktop OS's and desktop apps aren't good enough to make a steady cash flow from the customers to M$ and they decided to go to a cloud computing based rental model, which meant replacing disk based computers (a.k.a: PC's, Mac's, Sun boxes, AmigaOne's, Pegasos, etc) with some sort of modernized dumb terminals designed to run midori (that's the new name for the SingularityOS from M$) in good 'ol non-flashable ROM, and connect automatically to the M$ servers, there you access the apps you pay for and data you make with them. This system gives them all the control over the customer data (read: they can censor, modify add and delete customer's data at their leisure) and force customers to pay monthly fees (if the customer don't pay he gets locked out of the grid inmediatelly). Offcourse to get this going they need to make the current computers and OS's look insecure and bad, which means Vista has to get axed (XP was already on it's way out when they decided this), also lots of the malware seen latelly is made by them to further their plans which is to exacerbate the corporate heads so they embrace the "new" platform that M$ is gonna be offering.
BTW: I know about the M$ plan for the rental model because I met a M$ marketing PR girl at a local pub, got her drunk and she just spilled the beans (yeah, I know it was a mean trick, but I just couldn't miss that chance to steal their plans). Also they have this flexgo pay-per-use thing which clearly IS a precursor of their future rental system.
BTW2: I don't have any version of windoze, I know Vista from some of the college lab computers.

Why would you use the DOS version when the FreeBSD version works fine? It's SDL based.

I was joking.

Nevertheless, I cannot run ZSNES on FreeBSD because I am running FreeBSD/amd64. With ZSNES being written in assembly, and me being too lazy to play with 32-bit libraries for the pre-packaged version, I'm better off running it on my x86 OpenBSD or DOS machines.

__________________"Experience is what you get when you were expecting something else." - /usr/games/fortune

Actually, Vista isn't as bad as it's painted to be. Most of the criticism come from:
1) Windoze users who can't just grasp the idea that Vista doesn't let the system resources sit idle and instead preloads some of your installed apps so they start faster and releases resources as they're needed by apps not preloaded (something *NIX have been doing ever since it has existed, but windoze users never knew it since DOS (from where windoze came to be) had a very primitive resource handling system)

Personly, I think this is a stupid feature, for many different reasons, but most importantly because it yet another thing no one has anoy real control (Or even understanding) over, and more importantly because it doesn't seem to do a very good job since Vista is pretty slow, even the new Windows 7 preview/beta bulds are are faster.

Quote:

2) Mac and Linux users who haven't used the thing but want to just bash it b/c bashing M$ and it's software is the cool thing to do among themselves.

You haven't used it either .... So I find this a very odd argument coming from you.

Quote:

[...]they need to make the current computers and OS's look insecure and bad, which means Vista has to get axed (XP was already on it's way out when they decided this), also lots of the malware seen latelly is made by them to further their plans which is to exacerbate the corporate heads so they embrace the "new" platform that M$ is gonna be offering. [...]

Maybe the SpamAssasing and SpamFighter etc. people are also sending out spam to sell their products? And the police are committing crime to get bigger budgets?

Really, this is just stupid, malware has been a problem plaguing Windows for many years, long before Windows Vista was even close to being released, and the Windows XP default settings simply are extremely insecure.

Quote:

BTW2: I don't have any version of windoze, I know Vista from some of the college lab computers

So you haven't really used it ... Please don't get experience and knowledge get in the way of screaming your ``opinion'' on the internet.

More seriously, my main problems with Vista are:
o Those @#$ confirmation boxes every time, you often get TWO for a single executable, and quite often they're pushed to the background automatically, you notice the application isn't responding, and you notice the window in the taskbar, and it's AARRGG.

o I really dislike explorer in Vista ... I actually liked explorer in Windows 2000 and XP, but in Vista you can't really configure explorer properly, and it's packed with some pretty useless ``features''.

o I think the control panel is actually more difficult in Vista, it's difficult to find things, and many things aren't logically organized, it's even worse than the `new' XP control panel because the `classic' control panel also sucks in Vista.

o Network configuration is a pain, it shows that the Windows people really tried to make it user friendly (Remember that `user-friendly' means `easy for your 80-yr old mom to use' in the Windows world), but I find it difficult and cumbersome to use.

o It's so slow, even on modern PC's it's pretty slow and eat loads of RAM.

... And lots of smaller things ...

__________________
UNIX was not designed to stop you from doing stupid things, because that would also stop you from doing clever things.

o I think the control panel is actually more difficult in Vista, it's difficult to find things, and many things aren't logically organized, it's even worse than the `new' XP control panel because the `classic' control panel also sucks in Vista.

o Network configuration is a pain, it shows that the Windows people really tried to make it user friendly (Remember that `user-friendly' means `easy for your 80-yr old mom to use' in the Windows world), but I find it difficult and cumbersome to use.

uh, ye.... my sister and mom are using Vista....
Every single time when i need to configure wifi it's like nightmare....
I can't find the dam options......

1st time i tried to configure wifi on vista it took me about 2 hours to find "The dam hidden button" (don't laugh, i'm serious)

even after i found it (several times already), next time i will have to reinstall vista, it'll be the biggest pain in ass (even bigger then uninstalling stupid soft that comes with OEM vista, which btw takes a lot of time to do)

And have you tried using search in vista.....
It's completely ********

Actually, Vista isn't as bad as it's painted to be. Most of the criticism come from:
1) Windoze users who can't just grasp the idea that Vista doesn't let the system resources sit idle and instead preloads some of your installed apps so they start faster and releases resources as they're needed by apps not preloaded (something *NIX have been doing ever since it has existed, but windoze users never knew it since DOS (from where windoze came to be) had a very primitive resource handling system)
2) Mac and Linux users who haven't used the thing but want to just bash it b/c bashing M$ and it's software is the cool thing to do among themselves.
3) And more importantly M$ themselves. You see, somewhere during the development stages of Vista, the M$ exec's decided that desktop OS's and desktop apps aren't good enough to make a steady cash flow from the customers to M$ and they decided to go to a cloud computing based rental model, which meant replacing disk based computers (a.k.a: PC's, Mac's, Sun boxes, AmigaOne's, Pegasos, etc) with some sort of modernized dumb terminals designed to run midori (that's the new name for the SingularityOS from M$) in good 'ol non-flashable ROM, and connect automatically to the M$ servers, there you access the apps you pay for and data you make with them. This system gives them all the control over the customer data (read: they can censor, modify add and delete customer's data at their leisure) and force customers to pay monthly fees (if the customer don't pay he gets locked out of the grid inmediatelly). Offcourse to get this going they need to make the current computers and OS's look insecure and bad, which means Vista has to get axed (XP was already on it's way out when they decided this), also lots of the malware seen latelly is made by them to further their plans which is to exacerbate the corporate heads so they embrace the "new" platform that M$ is gonna be offering.
BTW: I know about the M$ plan for the rental model because I met a M$ marketing PR girl at a local pub, got her drunk and she just spilled the beans (yeah, I know it was a mean trick, but I just couldn't miss that chance to steal their plans). Also they have this flexgo pay-per-use thing which clearly IS a precursor of their future rental system.
BTW2: I don't have any version of windoze, I know Vista from some of the college lab computers.

I've used Vista, even helped a friend update his computer with it then "downdate" it a week later.
Vista isn't a bad piece of software in the sense that after M$ got some messy bugs fixed it pretty much works exactly as intended.
The "problem" with Vista lies in the fact that the typical computer consumer was not ready for it and neither were the companies that these people buy computers from. So when it was released those companies replaced XP with Vista in all their machines without attempting to match Vista's performance requirements. The result was computers with a system requiring a top-end graphics card and over a gigabyte of memory but only having 512 (and probably even only 256 sometimes) megabytes and a mediocre Intel graphics controller being sold to individuals who assume the problem is with the software and not the hardware.
Now that Vista's been out for quite awhile those companies are now meeting Vista's requirements splendidly and affordably. For a person that does not want to deal with the hardware incompatibilities or need a machine suitable for gaming (can't really game on Unix variants, few mainstream games are ported to them; Wine doesn't run many of them well; and emulation just doesn't cut it for gaming)

All that aside; Vista is a major resource hog, more than should be needed by an operating system alone.

Maybe this explains why most of the people I know with Vista boxes, also tend t have >= 3GB of RAM installed and an AMD CPU to drool over.

Vista-64 really works pretty well on a 3GHz Q6600 with 4GB of RAM. As others have mentioned, some of the options are hard to find, but overall I think it is pretty decent. And yes, even the search works well enough.

I like W2K too, but some more recent software (like Photoshop CS3) no longer supports it (and there are no work-arounds). Otherwise, there really is not much difference between it and XP.

FWIW, I have a W2K box that has never, ever, crashed. XP stability is pretty good too as long as the local network stays alive (it does not like printing to a network that goes away). Vista has been very stable too, but recently has shown a weird bug. An RDP session of a Vista VM shows on-screen corruption in the RDP session. Odd.

BTW: I know about the M$ plan for the rental model because I met a M$ marketing PR girl at a local pub, got her drunk and she just spilled the beans (yeah, I know it was a mean trick, but I just couldn't miss that chance to steal their plans).

You met a girl at a pub and got her drunk and all you wanted to do was steal their plans?
MY GOD MAN!

fwiw, my son has Vista on his highend, water-cooled, supermagopolus gaming machine with few problems, but I doubt he would notice any if they occured.

The only other Vista box we have is this desktop I'm on right now. It's for my wife so she can run Quickbooks on the road. It, too, is ~3Ghz and 3GB ram. At times it appears pokey and sluggish. At times the drive is running non-stop for no apparent reason other than what possibly others mentioned above.

Interestingly, I have gotten BSOD on it several times. The only thing I use this for is surfing and reading a tutorial on LISP. You can see it coming because everything just hangs for a second then...crash.

I do get frustrated trying to find where settings are and waiting for things to open up. I downloaded a video and it took me a minute to figure out where it went. My wife still has MSN Messenger and some news thing on here, came with the thing, but I forget it's there while waiting for Firefox to open and the drive to quit chugging away. Then it pops up hours later. Well, maybe not that long .

I tried ftp'ing to my fbsd boxes but it didn't work. I know I can't ssh but I need to find a way to do all that cause my fbsd notebook just hardware failed and this is all I've got for mobile use.

Indexing services, CPU 100% also.
This was a bug corrected with WinXP SP2, but the automatic update revived that bug. Still there.
Some months ago Windows help hinted me for a registry key to change.
Lost my paper napkin note and no way to find that page again.
Disabling the indexing service does not helps.
Indexing services is supposed to speed up things. Once it exists the loop

I know I can't ssh but I need to find a way to do all that cause my fbsd notebook just hardware failed and this is all I've got for mobile use.

Actually you can use ssh. Look into PuTTY. You can do scp with WinSCP. Also, don't forget about AT&T's UWin, which has a very healthy assortment of tools that you can use from the command line (using ksh). You can even install X11 and run a remote X session on your Windows box. And there is always Cygwin, though it feels too Linuxie for me.

I meant the actual ssh program but I'm aware of all those but never had a chance/time to try them. Forgot all about trying ssh on cygwin. I had it on my now broken laptop and could swear I used it there. (Yes, I know, I shouldn't swear.)

(OT but) I use copSSH on Windows, which provides the OpenSSH client and server (ssh.exe/sshd.exe) along with a few other programs -> it's cygwin based but doesn't require you to install cygwin.

I'm not aware of anything comparable to SSH that comes out of Redmond, without a focus on sharing the entire desktop session. So I went out and found a SSH server implementation that wouldn't bloat my disk, nor cost any of the cold hard ca$h. I.e. to SSH into the Windows machine.

I do however use PuTTY for a SSH client under Windows, as I know it's xterm compatibl'ish.

API? Maybe we should send the devs some information about it first? Wine is since the beginning more or less a gamble because they aren't able to do some steady development. CrossOver Office e.g. is a former fork of wine with steady quality in terms of compatibility.